ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 4 — The government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, making no concessions a day after seizing emergency powers, rounded up leading opposition figures and said Sunday that parliamentary elections could be delayed for as long as a year.

Security forces were reported to have rounded up about 500 opposition party figures, lawyers and human rights advocates Sunday, and about a dozen privately television news stations remained off the air. International broadcasters, including the BBC and CNN, were also cut.

The crackdown, announced late Saturday night after General Musharraf suspended the Constitution, was clearly aimed at preventing public demonstrations that political parties and lawyers were organizing for Monday.

“They are showing zero tolerance for protest,” said Athar Minallah, a lawyer, and a former minister in the Musharraf government.

In Islamabad, police forces continued to block the Parliament and Supreme Court buildings. But the day was mostly quiet, and there was no formal curfew. Several small protests were broken up, including one involving a two dozen people who scuffled with the police before being subdued and taken away.

Police officers armed with tear gas broke up a meeting at the headquarters of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission in Lahore and took dozens of people away in police vans, including elderly women, school teachers and about 20 lawyers, according to people at the meeting. In all, about 80 lawyers were detained, and many others who faced arrest warrants remained in hiding, according to members of a nationwide lawyer’s lobby that has grown increasingly influential as an anti-Musharraf voice.

The head of the human rights commission, and one of Pakistan’s most prominent democratic figures, Asma Jahangir, was placed under house arrest Saturday night. Among others arrested were Javed Hashmi, the acting president of the political party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and workers of the political party of the opposition leader, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Despite repeated warning by the United States and other Western nations over the past several days, the Musharraf government also appeared set to put off Parliamentary elections that had been scheduled for January. At a news conference Sunday, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said that the government was holding internal discussions on the future of the elections.

“We are still deliberating.,” he said. “In an emergency the parliament could give itself one year.”

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Pakistanis at a hotel in Rawalpindi watched a 45-minute speech by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the countrys leader, in which he explained his decision to declare a state of emergency.Credit
Wally Santana/Associated Press

As the Bush administration has seen General Musharraf, one of its closest allies in fighting terrorism, become increasingly unpopular with the Pakistani public in the past several months, American officials have urged the general to abandon his military post and hold free and fair elections to bolster his standing. But even though he promised from time to time to step down as Pakistan’s military leader while remaining as president, he never did so.

His decision to suspend the constitution and fire the Supreme Court was taken days before the court was due to decide whether his re-election on Oct. 6 was valid.

A government spokesman, Tariq Azim Kahn, when asked on Sunday why 500 people had been arrested, a government spokesman, said the arrests were “preventive measures” because the people presented “a threat to future law and order.”

In Karachi, Ms. Bhutto, who returned to Pakistan from Dubai hours after emergency rule was imposed, spent Sunday at her residence there. Leaders of her party, the Pakistan People’s Party, said she would fly to Islamabad on Sunday to hold talks with other opposition parties on how to proceed. But Ms. Bhutto did not show up here.

In interviews with foreign broadcast outlets, she called on the Musharraf government to lift what she called “martial law” and to hold elections.

Sympathizers of Ms. Bhutto, who came back to Pakistan with the backing of the United States and the specific mandate of bringing a democratic face to Pakistan, said her options for influencing the situation were limited.

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Ms. Bhutto’s most potent weapon — the potential to rally large numbers of demonstrators — was now in severe trouble, said Najem Sethi, the editor in chief of The Daily Times.

Organizing large protests under emergency rule, and after the bomb attack on her arrival procession Oct. 18 that killed 140 people, would be very difficult for her, he said.

“She will be very critical,” Mr. Sethi said. “But she is not going to participate in protests. She’s going to make a token representation. Behind the scenes she will work with the government for election as soon as possible.” Enver Baig, a senior leader of her party, said that the group’s strategy in the immediate future would be announced Monday.

Among the lawyers arrested was the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, Aitzaz Ahsan, who has opposed General Musharraf in legal arguments before the Supreme Court. Mr. Ahsan led the protests last spring over the firing of the Supreme Court Justice, Iftkhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

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Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader, returned from Dubai after emergency law was declared. She was greeted by supporters at the Karachi airport.Credit
Rizwan Tabassum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A legal colleague of Mr. Ahsan, Ayesha Tammy Haq, waited outside the Adiala jail in Rawalpinidi, the garrison city adjacent to the capital, to see Mr. Ahsan on Sunday.

“If you want to take the country away from Talibanization these are the people who can do it, the secular middle class,” Ms. Haq said.

One of General Musharraf’s main justifications for suspending the constitution and firing the members of the Supreme Court was the need to combat extremists sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. In his address, he blamed the Supreme Court for hampering the government’s anti-terror efforts by releasing terror suspects.

Even though the government was doing all it could to prevent public demonstrations by the legal profession, lawyers said they had other strategies to undermine the emergency rule.

An effort would be made to persuade lawyers not to appear before any judges who had agreed to be sworn in as judges under the emergency decree, said Mr. Minallah, the lawyer and former government minister.

Further, two thirds of the judges in the high courts had resigned or were not invited to be sworn in again under the emergency laws, said Feisal Navki, a lawyer who was at the raided meetingOnly five of the Supreme Court’s 17 judges agreed to take a new oath of office Sunday morning, Mr. Navki said.

At the government news conference in Islamabad, Prime Minister Aziz spoke further about controls on the news media that were reported on Saturday night. Broadcasters had said that the government had issued issued orders that journalists who brought “ridicule or disrepute” to General Musharraf and other officials could face up to three years in prison. On Sunday, Mr. Aziz said that the government would meet with television broadcasters to work out a “code of conduct.”

“The government is going to decide what the parameters are,” he said.

Pakistani journalists, proud of the dozen or so privately owned news channels that have flourished in the last three years, said Sunday they would refuse to knuckle under. “We will resist by not institutionally accepting this,” said Talat Hussein, the director of news and current affairs at the Aaj channel.

After a meeting of the Federal Union of Journalists here, the president of the Islamabad Press Club, Afzal Butt, said the press would boycott government functions and press briefings.

Earlier, the director of the Aaj channel, Wamiq Zuberi, said a magistrate accompanied by five buses of gun-toting police officers showed up at the studios Saturday night and attempted to confiscate an outdoor broadcasting van. The magistrate did not have a warrant and the workers at the studio stood their ground, forcing the officials to leave empty handed, Mr. Zuberi said.